ABSTRACT
It was the middle of the eighteenth century when a young Scotch couple landed in the City of New York. They were natives of Kelso, a town on the River Tweed, fifty-two miles southeast of Edinburgh. They had spent their honeymoon in crossing the Atlantic. The man was tall, bronzed, brawny, and broad-shouldered. He bent slightly as he trudged through the unpaved streets with the scant belongings of the pair. What weighted him down was a kit of blacksmith's tools. The couple settled in the northeastern section of the city—then a mere handful of less than 15,000 inhabitants, many of whom still spoke the language of Petrus Stuyvesant.
